When Should I Use the Commercial Version?

If you develop an application for use within your own company and want to be
able to access OpenQM support services from your dealer or directly from
Ladybridge Systems, you should buy a commercial licence. Use of the open
source version would expose you to risk of excessive downtime if you
encountered a problem as there is no support.

If you are a VAR or a software developer who wants to sell applications with a
support contract, you have a selling advantage by buying a commercial licence
that allows you to show your customers that you can legally back up the
support that you sell.

If you wish to preserve commercial trade secrets contained within your source
code, you should buy a commercial licence. It is very easy to break the terms
of the GPL inadvertently if you do not make your source code publicly
available. If you do so, then you will have to publish your source code, along
with your trade secrets. In this scenario, it would not be adequate to
immediately switch to a commercial licence by paying the commercial fee. You
would already have broken the GPL distribution clauses, and so would have to
offer your source code to those that you had provided the object code. It's
better to buy a commercial licence up-front, and then you are not bound by the
GPL.

If you would like to contribute to the development of OpenQM or influence the
development of new features, then you should consider an appropriately sized
commercial licence. Alternatively, discuss your requirements with us and we
will provide a quotation for bespoke modifications.

The commercial release is available for a wider range of platforms, such as
Microsoft Windows and Mac.

The open source contains only the core multivalue database components.
Advanced features of the commercial version may not be included.

The open source version was released as a sandbox for developers to try new
ideas that they might contribute to the main OpenQM project. It is still valid
in this role despite not being updated since 2007. It is unlikely that there
will be a further release under the GPL.